


Body Art

by alouette_des_champs



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, F/F, Feels, Georgie is fine don't worry about her but uh Melanie could be better, Oh god oh fuck I got some, Season/Series 04, Self-Harm, Slaughter!Melanie, in my horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:15:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25771936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alouette_des_champs/pseuds/alouette_des_champs
Summary: Something that used to be Melanie King pays Georgie a visit.
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	Body Art

**Author's Note:**

> First up, this was HEAVILY inspired by Jennifer's Body. If you've seen it, you'll know exactly which scene as soon as you start reading. This is set the night of The Flesh's attack during which Melanie truly went sicko mode.
> 
> Title from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRIT-neg3Rg

“Oh, no, no, no,” Georgie said before she even had the door open all the way. _“Absolutely_ not.”

Melanie King was on her doorstep, dramatically backlit by a streetlamp, her features illuminated by the softer light from inside the apartment. The blood looked horror-movie fake on her pale face, but it smelled all too real.

“Can I come in?” Her voice was uncharacteristically gravelly, hoarse as if she had been screaming. 

_Vampire rules,_ Georgie thought absently. Against her better judgment, she nodded—the necessary invitation—and stood aside so that Melanie could enter. She watched the other woman move gingerly, jerkily across the room, then stop short in the middle, stiff as a scarecrow. It suddenly occurred to Georgie that Melanie might hurt her. She’d never thought that about her before, but there seemed to be significantly less Melanie than usual present in the person currently standing in her home. _Death is edging her out in her own body._

What a strange thought, made even stranger by the fact that she wasn’t entirely sure where it had come from.

“What happened?” Georgie asked sharply, shutting the door a little more forcefully than necessary. “If I’m about to be an accessory to murder— _again,_ mind you—then I need to know.”

No answer. Melanie didn’t move, didn’t even turn her head.

“Melanie?” Georgie approached her slowly. She could see that Melanie was breathing hard, her hunched shoulders rising and falling alarmingly jaggedly. She reached out and touched her arm gently. As soon as she made contact, Melanie whipped around with a strangled sound. Her eyes were wide and glassy, shot through with broken blood vessels like lightning strikes, and her teeth were bared in an angry, fearful grimace. Georgie took a calculated step back, out of arm's reach.

“Are you okay?”

“No.” A laugh ripped out of her, completely humorless. “No, I’m not.”

There was a moment of silence that seemed to crackle between them before Melanie lunged forward, coming at her wild and uncoordinated. Georgie stumbled backwards and scrambled for the kitchen, putting the table between the two of them. She may not have had the capacity to feel fear, but adrenaline still zipped through her in the face of danger, sharpening her instincts instead of dulling her mind with panic. She backed up against the kitchen counter, her eyes never leaving the Melanie-shaped thing that was advancing toward her. Georgie reached behind her and fumbled for the first utensil she could get her hands on…

 _Fantastic._ A wooden spoon.

Georgie didn’t want to hit Melanie, not even with a spoon, so she just held it out in front of her like an idiot, ready to block any further attacks. Melanie stopped right in front of her, swaying like she was fighting her own muscles, a puppet on tangled strings. Up close, she could see that Melanie’s skin was ashen, her eyes ringed with deep purple, her lips chapped and cracked.

One of her hands shot out and knocked the spoon out of Georgie’s grip before she could deflect it. She may have looked half-dead, but she was _strong._ Melanie took hold of both of her shoulders and held them with a bone-crushing grip. Grtting her teeth against the pain, Georgie met the eyes of whatever was in front of her. They certainly weren’t Melanie’s eyes. Melanie’s eyes were sharp and sparkling with wit, a tricky color of brown that turned to caramel in the sun. This thing’s eyes were dull and flat; they sucked in light and smothered it like two black holes.

Slowly, Melanie’s knees began to buckle, and she sank toward the floor, taking Georgie with her. The cold press of the tiles against her thighs jarred her back into the moment.

“What’s wrong with you?” she whispered. “Are you…sick?” She knew this was a stupid thing to ask as soon as it left her mouth, but she decided to let herself off the hook for not being entirely eloquent, given the circumstances. Melanie released Georgie’s shoulders and flexed her hands, looking at them as if they belonged to someone else, a pair of vile, foreign objects.

“I don’t…I don’t know,” Melanie groaned through clenched teeth. “I feel like I’m going to explode.” She dug her fingernails into her own forearms, opening deep channels in her flesh as if that might offer her some relief. Blood boiled forth like water from broken earth. Georgie instinctively reached out to stop her, but Melanie recoiled like a wounded animal. 

This had to have something to do with all that secretive, spooky bullshit they were always on at the Institute. She wanted to call Jon, firstly to chew him out for roping Melanie into his murder circus and secondly to ask him what the hell she was supposed to do, but he was lying in the hospital, in an impossible coma. In that moment, Georgie couldn’t even remember anyone else at that place’s name, let alone who among them was still both alive and in possession of all their faculties.

“How can I help?”

Melanie looked like she was about to answer, but before she could, an expression of panic came over her face. She rolled onto her hands and knees and vomited a bright tide of blood. 

“Jesus Christ!” Georgie exclaimed, scrambling backwards as it spread thickly across the tiles. For some reason, she had the idea that if that blood touched her, it would burn her skin. Melanie heaved again and again, her entire body wracked as she brought up an impossible amount of red-black blood. In between gasps, she spit out what looked like chunks of torn viscera; it splashed obscenely into the growing pool around her. Georgie was certain that she saw a tooth embedded in one of these fleshy gobs, even though she was relatively certain that Melanie still had her full set of thirty-two.

When it was finally over, Melanie flopped over onto her side, gasping for breath, shaking violently. There was no avoiding the mess now; the small kitchen was flooded. Georgie crawled through the nauseatingly warm slurry to Melanie’s side. She helped her right herself, started to pull strands of blood-drenched hair away from her mouth, which was ringed with gore. Melanie’s eyes had rolled back into her head, more spidering red than white, but when she felt the other woman’s hands on her face, they flickered back to life—something like it, anyway.

“Let’s get you in the shower,” Georgie said softly, projecting a steadiness she did not feel. “Come on.”

She half-carried the other woman to the bathroom and turned the shower on hot. Melanie ripped her soiled clothes off and stepped under the water with a guttural sigh. She did not pull the curtain closed. These were _not_ the circumstances under which Georgie had wanted to see Melanie King completely naked for the first time, and someday, whatever malevolent god had set off this chain of events was going to pay for that.

“Do you want me to stay?” Georgie asked. Melanie gave a short, sharp nod in reply, so sat down on the lid of the toilet, unable to take her eyes off the water that was rolling wine-red, cherry-red, then pink off her body. Melanie had always been thin, but now she was sick-skinny, her hipbones jutting out at an angry angle, her limbs knobby, her chest ridged with bone. Her stair-stepped ribcage stuttered in time with her uneven breathing. Aside from the self-inflicted gouges on her arms, she had other wounds, what looked like bites marks from something that was neither fully human nor fully animal. Her clothes, in a pile on the floor, were absolutely shredded. _What the fuck happened?_

When all of the blood and grit had been washed down the drain, Georgie turned the water off and coaxed Melanie out of the shower. She tried to hand her a towel, but Melanie just stood there staring at it as if she had forgotten what to do with such a thing. Moving slowly so as not to surprise her, Georgie began to rub Melanie’s hair dry. She was ready to pull back if the other woman took a swipe at her, but Melanie stood stock still, shivering slightly, eyes unfocused. It seemed as if most of the fight had gone out of her with the blood. Georgie moved down her body as quickly as she could, taking care not to put pressure on any of her wounds.

“Can I bandage you up?” Georgie asked. As if in answer, Melanie touched a deep gash on her shoulder. Georgie watched as the skin around the wound warped slowly, crawling like a single-celled organism’s pseudopod; inch by inch, her flesh was knitting the wound closed with supernatural speed. Georgie breathed out sharply. “No need, then, I suppose.”

When she released her, Melanie staggered out of the bathroom and across the hall, to where she knew the bedroom would be. She collapsed onto the bed as if every molecule of her energy had been used up. Georgie took a moment to grab a few things from the bathroom before she followed her. She spread a spare blanket over the other woman’s spare white body, then pulled a chair up and sat down beside the bed. 

“I think I’m dying,” Melanie whispered into the pillow.

“No,” Georgie said firmly, as if she had any say in the matter. She held out her hand; in the center of her palm was a little white pill.

“This will help you sleep, alright?” She held the glass of water while Melanie sipped from it, swallowed the pill. The blood that was drying on her skin and her clothes was starting to itch, but she could wait a little longer to wash it off. She watched as the tension slowly ebbed from the mutilated cage of Melanie’s body. Her breathing became more even as sleep claimed her, but Georgie could still see the unsettling creep of her torn skin as her body healed itself manically, feverishly. 

Georgie wanted more than anything to touch her, to untangle her damp hair with her fingers, to press her lips to her forehead, but she had the devastating suspicion that she could touch this body all she wanted without Melanie, the _real_ Melanie, ever feeling much of anything. She thought about those plasma globes they always had at science museums, the way the ethereal lightning trapped inside would follow your hand when you touched the glass surface. Maybe she could bring Melanie back that way, draw her to the surface of her own body with the heat of her hands, conducting her personhood like energy. Maybe she just didn’t want to feel so helpless.

She watched Melanie’s face as she slept, somehow still set in an expression of pain or fury or both. Georgie could tell she was grinding her teeth. Strangely, that was the thing that gave her hope that some of Melanie King’s instincts and compulsions remained intact. Melanie _always_ ground her teeth: when she slept, when she was frustrated, when she was working…of course, Georgie couldn’t help but nag her about it. _Unclench!_ she would demand, tapping her own jaw to demonstrate what she meant. Melanie would roll her eyes and do her best impression of a ventriloquist’s dummy, waggling her jaw into ridiculous positions to make her laugh. 

Georgie reached out to stroke her pointer finger along the tight ridge of Melanie’s jaw, channeling all her intentions, everything she knew about healing, all the good things she had tried to cultivate in the empty spot that fear had left behind. After a moment, she could have sworn she felt the strained muscles loosen just a little.

A little was all she needed.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on Twitter @prettyalouettey and tell me the craziest thing _you've_ ever done for your crush. Ugh hate it when she shows up at my house late at night possessed by the concept of warfare itself amirite ladies.


End file.
